Galliano Fashion House Names Bill Gaytten Creative Director

June 25 (Bloomberg) -- John Galliano’s fashion house named
Bill Gaytten as new creative director to replace the label’s
eponymous founding designer who was fired this year and is
standing trial in Paris for making anti-Semitic comments.

Gaytten, born in England in 1960, has worked at Galliano
for 23 years after employment at Victor Edelstein for three
years, the fashion house said in a statement yesterday.

“Gaytten’s expertise to innovate patterns, cut and drape
are what define the DNA of the house,” the statement said.

John Galliano told a Paris court this week that addictions
to alcohol and drugs left him unable to remember anti-Semitic
and racist attacks that bar patrons said he made. He said was
sorry for “the sadness this affair has caused.”

The 50-year-old, Gibraltar-born designer said he began
receiving treatment for addiction to alcohol, sleeping pills and
valium at a clinic in Arizona in February and is now being
treated in Switzerland. He isn’t working.

Galliano was fired by Christian Dior SA over a video
recording of him saying “I love Hitler.” He testified this
week that, when questioned by police, he denied making other
racist and anti-Semitic statements outright because, “I was
still taking those pills. I was in complete denial.”

Galliano’s accusers at the trial said he uttered the slurs
at a café in Paris’s fashionable third arrondissement. Within
days of that Feb. 24 incident, an undated video of a slurring
Galliano praising Adolf Hitler, and saying “people like you
would be dead,” was posted on the website of the U.K. tabloid
The Sun. Galliano was fired by the Paris fashion house the next
day, less than a week before he was to host its women’s ready-to-wear show.